Three and a half years ago the writer Robert Jones and producer Kath Mattock came at the crime genre from an unusual angle. Instead of having characters in a murder case talk to one another, they all addressed the camera directly, each offering their own apparently unmediated viewpoint. The title took its cue from the direct style: Murder. Murder: Joint Enterprise won a Bafta. It has taken a while, but the single experimental film has given birth to a short series of three new cases.

Author James Runcie (son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury) hit on a cunning formula with his Grantchester Mysteries. Since the British are incurably addicted to maverick detectives, country house mysteries, clergymen who are part-time sleuths and foul deeds in the heart of the English countryside, why not just repackage the lot like a larcenous Greatest Hits? Take one cleric, add one copper, plant 'em in the Grantchester meadows... Now That's What I Call Crime! Vol 1.

When it comes to losing power, and powers failing, Michael Gambon has once again proved himself the ruler of choice. The actor who gave us his Lear when he was only just hitting his forties has had three decades of gurning and grouching to ready himself for Churchill’s Secret, and those earlier royal storm rantings even got a wry mention in Charles Sturridge’s nicely autumnal, rather more sotto voce drama.

Here’s a paradox. Just as the words “new Cold War” were beginning to form on the lips of political commentators in the West, two British film-makers, former TV newsmen no less, were being granted uncensored access to the Bolshoi Theatre – just 500 metres from the Kremlin – to make a candid documentary for HBO. Their cameras didn't stop turning for four months.

It was all a far cry from the Leeds Piano Competition. Shunted on to BBC Four after the disappearance of BBC Three to online, Eurovision: You Decide nevertheless remained true to its new channel’s original remit. In today’s no-brow, morally neutral multiverse it would be churlish to point out the thoughts that it encouraged were entirely dirty ones.

Who’s the Boss? occupies a square-eyed quadrant somewhere between Gogglebox and The Apprentice. If you like those, you’ll probably like this jaunty workplace experiment in which it’s not the boss who hires applicants for a new job, but the workforce. In Ancient Rome they called it Saturnalia, when for one day of the year the hierarchy was reversed. Nowadays you’d call it Siliconalia because like more or less everything these days the idea originated in Silicon Valley.

John le Carré's 1993 novel The Night Manager was his first post-Cold War effort, and the fortuitous setting of its early scenes in a hotel in Cairo has allowed TV dramatiser David Farr to move the action forward from the post-Thatcher fallout to the 2011 "Arab Spring".  Here we encountered the fastidiously tailored Jonathan Pine, the titular night manager of the Nefertiti hotel, a man who keeps his head while all around him is panic, gunfire and explosions.

Last year China began formally to phase out the one-child policy which had been in place since 1979. So a drama called One Child arrives at the right time. It forms the least worshipful component of the BBC’s current China season, which mainly interests itself in food and history. Its focus is in fact not on the ruinous psychological and economic consequences for a nation of only children. Instead the drama deals with another contemporary Chinese ill: the corruption of the legal process by power and money.

You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something.

Waldemar Januszczak always has a provoking agenda to shape his now nearly countless forays into television art history. In this four-part series he's out to challenge what he sees as the unthinking acceptance of the one-dimensional traditional and monopolistic version of the Renaissance.